Pieces of the Performance Puzzle: Structured Data & Feeds

Ignite the Power of Data

With data serving as the root of many advertising products offered by today’s search and social platforms, advertisers looking to find efficiencies across their ecommerce initiatives should pay attention to details within their meta data.

Meta Feeds

A meta feed is a file of organized data attributes that provide ecommerce partners with information about your brick and mortar locations, online/offline merchandise, inventory, pricing, etc. Search and social giants, Amazon, Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and the like, sell ad units powered by this meta data. When the technology behind these platforms fully understand what your brand has to offer (a pair of shoes, a credit card, a hotel room), product detail (size, APR%, inventory, product name, rate) and the availability of the inventory (online, in-store, delivery date), the better prepared you are to match search queries. Providing meta data allows platforms to better recommend, suggest and align your products and services to consumer queries.

More advanced, structured data is the process of combining and matching optimized feeds, along with other first- and third-party data. These first- and third-party sources could include cross-channel demand, inventory, sales, margin, even the weather or a country’s GDP. While optimized feeds are focused on alignment to search behavior, structured data is focused on maximizing the investments behind the advertiser’s products or service offerings using unique data signals. Delivering this data in a regular cadence to your ecommerce partners is ideal.

We’ve seen advertisers leverage a wide array of all three feed types to accomplish a myriad of goals. We’ve seen them leverage this data to market country-related apparel during the World Cup, or capture demand during weather events and even drive online to in-store sales. Some advertisers are leveraging their data and feeds for non-ecommerce initiatives with business units in their organization. Outside of ecommerce application, we see more business analysts leveraging structured data to inform decision-making on different aspects of the business. In these cases, IT resources assist marketing and ecommerce teams with the necessary data. For the financial services, travel, retail and media verticals, data and feeds are behind a majority of the largest revenue-driving ad programs. We see this data impacting paid search, mobile/local search, SEO, display, affiliates and vertical-specific search programs like CSEs, PLAs/Shopping Campaigns, HPAs, Commercial Actions, etc.

If you are unsure about whether your organization is leveraging these data sources, or are interested in learning more about how structured data can impact your ecommerce performance, let us know here.